Click on the thumbnails for a taste of the show. INX Group is a membership organization of illustrators and graphic artists who have created drawings that speak volumes. The exhibit features over 150 pieces of original cartoons that poke fun at every aspect of American political life.

The history of graphic social satire is brutish and long. An acid-tinged line can be traced from Francisco de Goya’s etchings exposing Napoleon’s bloody Spanish campaign to Honoré Daumier’s lithographs lampooning the French class system. It links Thomas Nast’s newspaper drawings that cut to Tammany Hall’s corrupt heart with George Grosz’s graphic excoriations of decadent post-Weimar Germany. This impulse to hold up a looking glass to an imperfect world lives on in the INX artists represented in this exhibit. Since 1980, the INX group has produced compelling visual commentary on the major events that have spanned the millennial divide.

The INX group was formed with a core of New York Times editorial illustrators at the dawn of the Age of Reagan. The name "INX" was a play on the essential medium employed by these pen and brush artists. They shared a desire to produce and distribute uncensored political images to the news marketplace, keeping editorial control in the hands of the creators. Free-lancers granted such freedom were galvanized, producing sharp, cutting illustrations, even when the remuneration was meager. Camaraderie and passion for the work sustained the group for over three years until the complexities of managing a small business communally drove many members away. Those who remained stabilized INX by negotiating a long-term contract with United Feature Syndicate. Under this arrangement, which was in place when most of the work in this show was created, the contributors were encouraged to concentrate on their art instead of its promotion and distribution.

At the beginning of each week, four or more artists were commissioned by a member art director to contribute illustrations on the topics of the day. By midweek they met at United Feature’s midtown Manhattan offices to drop off their artwork, which was then syndicated to newspapers in the U.S. and overseas. On a good day they continued on to a brunch of brainstorming and gossip. In this loose-limbed fashion INX generated a body of work composed of over 4000 editorial images, a powerful graphic chronicle of the last two decades. Since 2002 the group has returned to self-syndication, this time employing the powerful distribution means of the internet by allowing subscribers to download the work directly from their website, inxart.com. 

From broad caricature to somber surrealism these drawings represent diverse aesthetics and techniques. The more than fifty contributors to the show represent a wide range of backgrounds, national origins and, most importantly, opinions. Thus INX has turned its collective eye on the world and left a record — a picture history — of pointed views meant to amuse, incite and inspire. 

This show originally appeared at St. John’s University, curated by Thomas Kerr. It has traveled to Syracuse University (co-curated by Yvonne Buchanan), Parsons School of Design, and on to Canada at The Triangle Gallery in Calgary and The Works Gallery in Edmonton. It most recently appeared at MCS Gallery in Easton, PA. Thanks to those arts organizations and to all the artists who have contributed to INX.